Using Citizen Science to Scout Honey Bee Colonies That Naturally Survive Varroa destructor Infestations

Abstract

Citizen Science contributes significantly to the conservation of biodiversity, but its application to honey bee research has remained minimal. Even though certain European honey bee (Apis mellifera) populations are known to naturally survive Varroa destructor infestations, it is unclear how widespread or common such populations are. Such colonies are highly valuable for investigating the mechanisms enabling colony survival, as well as for tracking the conservation status of free-living honey bees. Here, we use targeted Citizen Science to identify potentially new cases of managed or free-living A. mellifera populations that survive V. destructor without mite control strategies. In 2018, a survey containing 20 questions was developed, translated into 13 languages, and promoted at beekeeping conferences and online. After three years, 305 reports were collected from 28 countries: 241 from managed colonies and 64 from free-living colonies. The collected data suggest that there could be twice as many naturally surviving colonies worldwide than are currently known. Further, online and personal promotion seem to be key for successful recruitment of participants. Although the survivor status of these colonies still needs to be confirmed, the volume of reports and responses already illustrate how effectively Citizen Science can contribute to bee research by massively increasing generated data, broadening opportunities for comparative research, and fostering collaboration between scientists, beekeepers, and citizens. The success of this survey spurred the development of a more advanced Citizen Science platform, Honey Bee Watch, that will enable a more accurate reporting, confirmation, and monitoring of surviving colonies, and strengthen the ties between science, stakeholders, and citizens to foster the protection of both free-living and managed honey bees.

Population demography of feral honeybee colonies in central European forests

“…However, it is not clear whether the parasite inevitably causes naïve wild-living honeybees to go entirely extinct because, on the population level, frequent reproduction by established colonies might level out colony losses [28][29][30]. There is a growing number of reports from Europe documenting the occurrence of honeybee colonies nesting wild in various types of cavities and habitats [7,14,17,[31][32][33][34][35][36], but we currently lack detailed studies of their population dynamics.…”

“…While ‘bee-lining’, the tracing of honeybees from artificial feeding sites to their homes, can be used as an unbiased search method [ 44 ], finding actual nests (and not only their approximate locations) is very time-consuming [ 7 , 32 , 44 , 45 ]. Hence, the most used method is asking the public for help [ 17 , 26 , 31 , 34 , 46 , 47 ]. The downside of citizen science is that the reported colonies are typically scattered over a large area, so that researchers further rely on many volunteers to collect data on survival rates, potentially compromising data quality.…”

Unprecedented Density and Persistence of Feral Honey Bees in Urban Environments of a Large SE-European City (Belgrade, Serbia)

“…Successful cohabitation with Varroa is well known in closely related Asian species (Apis cerana), which co-evolved with this parasite [23]. Understanding the mechanisms behind these interactions might provide clues for improving the health status and fitness of managed A. mellifera colonies and securing perspectives for sustainable beekeeping [41][42][43][44]. In that respect, various studies focused on genetic differences between feral and managed colonies [31], or on more efficient hygienic and grooming behaviors [35,45] that might have evolved in colonies left untreated against parasites.…”

Preservation methods of honey bee-collected pollen are not a source of bias in ITS2 metabarcoding

“…Citizen science is becoming increasingly applied in ecological studies and also in bee research (Koffler et al, 2021;Miller-Rushing et al, 2012;Moro et al, 2021). The involvement of interested citizens has many advantages.…”